FilmFest KC

The 13th-annual event presents more than 40 movies
from Friday, September 8, through Thursday, September
14, at the Screenland, 1656 Washington. For details or to
purchase tickets ($8 apiece or $45 for a festival pass),
see www.filmkc.org or call 816
-421-2900. Capsule reviews of select FilmFest movies
and current releases appear below as space allows.
Writers are Michael Atkinson (M.A.), Bill Gallo (B.G.),
Melissa Levine (M.L.), Jean Oppenheimer (J.O.), Rob
Nelson (R.N.), Gregg Rickman (G.R.), Jim Ridley (J.R.), R.
Emmet Sweeney (R.E.S.), Luke Y. Thompson (L.Y.T.) and
Robert Wilonsky (R.W.).

After Innocence As scientific advances have made forensic DNA matching a reality, a new field has emerged in criminal justice: exoneration. In some cases, preserved biological evidence has allowed innocent inmates, who have served time for decades, to walk free. And then what? That’s the question posed by this piercing and intelligent documentary by director Jessica Sanders. Unlike criminals who are released on parole, exonerees receive no assistance from the system that wrongfully imprisoned them. Not surprisingly, they struggle. One gets the sense that the seven men profiled here are faring better than their cohorts, and yet they’re still plagued with difficulties: finding work, being accepted by their communities, establishing intimate relationships with other people, re-entering a world that has left them behind. Their stories are harrowing and infuriating, and Sanders does a fine, sometimes hopeful job of bringing us into that experience. (M.L.)

The Bridesmaid Given his dogged fascination with psychopathic crime intersecting with bourgeois lives, it’s a surprise to find that The Bridesmaid is only Claude Chabrol’s second adaptation of a Ruth Rendell novel (after La Cérémonie). It is, in any case, a psychodrama of typically brisk efficiency and relaxed gallows humor. The semi-functioning family at the center is sketched in — responsible son (with incestuous lurkings), high-spirited single mom (Aurore Clément), bickering sisters — before we meet the titular catalyst at a family wedding: Senta (Laura Smet), a sensuous but off-putting seductress with a mysterious past. Smet, all eyelashes and butterscotch skin, is the film’s prize; she doesn’t act out the character’s slowly revealed pathologies so much as keep them barely contained behind her mesmerizing stare. Chabrol’s visual storytelling remains as no-nonsense as his genre expertise. (M.A.)

The Edukators Peter (Stipe Erceg) and Jan (Daniel Brühl) case the neighborhoods of the well-to-do, figure out what kind of alarm systems are in place, then disable them in order to break in and … rearrange the furniture in creative ways. It’s their form of anti-capitalist protest, and it works well until a woman inevitably comes between them. Unlike in, say, Fight Club, director Hans Weingartner does not hedge his bets on the notion of whether anarchy is any better than societal conformity — his heart is with the Edukators, period. (L.Y.T.)

Free Zone Natalie Portman has cruised by on her looks on several occasions, but co-writer and director Amos Gitai ruins that possibility right off the bat here with a 10-minute static close-up of her crying until the eyeliner runs down her face, to the tune of a mournful, insanely catchy Hebrew song about cycles of destruction. Portman plays Rebecca, a young American in Israel who leaves her fiancé after learning the truth about his past. She’s so desperate to leave the country that she tags along with a Jewish cab driver (Hana Laszlo) driving to the Free Zone — an area straddling the borders of Iraq, Jordan and Saudi Arabia where used cars and other things are sold — to collect on a debt for the driver’s wounded husband. Shot mostly in close-ups, it’s a fascinating road movie with an absurdist allegorical finale. (L.Y.T.)

Games of Love and Chance Thanks to a win at the French Oscars, this 2003 film about Muslim-French teenagers in the suburban Paris projects is now getting a lot of attention — and an international release. That’s fortunate for us, even if the relentless verbal aggression and awkwardly translated slang are wearying at times. The plot centers on Krimo (Osman Elkharraz), a shy boy with a crush on Lydia (Sara Forestier), the only blonde (and non-Arab, it seems) girl in the neighborhood. Worried that Krimo’s ex-girlfriend still wants him, Lydia won’t say whether she’s interested. (In French, the film is known by the superior name of L’Esquive, or The Dodging.) While he waits for an answer, Krimo attempts to win Lydia by starring opposite her in their class play. Not much happens, and there’s a lot of yelling. Still, there is tenderness hidden in the cracks, and Games is a very real portrait of urban teenage experience. (M.L.)

The Holy Girl In this drama from Argentina’s Lucrecia Martel (La Ciénaga), Amalia, a teenager living in her family’s decrepit resort hotel, is groped by a fortyish visiting doctor during a street concert. Stimulated by her sexually experienced friend and her own increasingly feverish religiosity, the sullen girl makes “saving” the doctor her avocation. Meanwhile, her attractive mother resists the temptation to seduce him herself. Martel’s tendency to eschew wide or establishing shots leaves her camera hovering at the backs of her characters’ necks or reclining next to them, evoking an intimacy that blends sensuality with the nearness of the divine. Half-heard murmurings and girlish gossip, as well as preparations for a physicians’ conference demonstration, build tension in this story of the sacred and corrupting implications of the laying on of hands. (F.L.)

Iron Island The second feature by Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof is an obvious allegory, but it’s an unusually vivid, even visceral one for being set almost entirely on an abandoned oil tanker — a corroded planet adrift in the azure cosmos of the Persian Gulf. It’s a floating neighborhood populated by an assortment of cute kids, busybody octogenarians and women masked in stylized burkas. Giving advice and delivering orders, Captain Nemat (Ali Nasirian) is the father of his “tenants.” His name echoes Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo, but he assumes the more primally patriarchal roles of Abraham, Noah and Moses. There’s a timeless, elemental quality to the situation, but Nemat’s reign is not without incident; his boat, as he is loath to admit, is taking on water. Depending on one’s mood, the movie might seem poetic or prosaic. Either way, Iron Island poses the questions that were always asked of movies produced behind the Iron Curtain and later in China: How was it shown at home, and what does it mean there? (J.H.)

La Petite Jérusalem Set in Sarcelles, a low-income Orthodox Jewish community in Paris, French writer-director Karin Albou’s first feature film is the story of two sisters. Mathilde (Elsa Zylberstein) is a devout wife and mother who embraces the laws of her faith. She lives in an apartment with her husband; her four young children; her mother; and her sister, Laura (Fanny Valette), who studies Kantian philosophy, which exalts reason over all else. Mathilde’s marriage is deteriorating because she believes that her religion forbids sexual pleasure, whereas Laura believes that passions must be subordinated to rational thought. On one level, the film examines the sexual awakening of both women. It also looks at the animosity between Arabs and Jews when Laura falls in love with a young Algerian man she meets at work. This is really Laura’s story, and Valette does a superb job of communicating both her character’s intellectual struggles and her emotional fragility. (J.O.)

Lemming Exhilaratingly anxious, Dominik Moll’s film charts familiar territory with gravity, inventive iconography and spooky rhythms. It’s a savory psychodrama and a triumph of unsettled reaction shots. The comfortable affluence of an inventor (Laurent Lucas) and his gamine of a wife (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is beleaguered first by his boss (André Dussollier) and the man’s semi-psychotic wife (Charlotte Rampling), then by the metaphoric torque of a semi-living lemming found in their kitchen-sink drainpipe. Suicide, could-be hauntings and betrayal follow. Moll’s achievement is all in the backbeats and portents, and the result is less like Hitchcock than like Lynch. The wallop of disquiet is delicious. (M.A.)

Look Both Ways An unassuming, unadventurous but likable dramedy about dying and grief, Sarah Watt’s debut feature has pleased audiences in Australia and abroad. It’s not hard to see why — rename it Death, Actually, and a sense of its fluffy, faux-angsty approach is brought to bear. Previously a watercolorist-animator, Watt punctuates her film with mordant painterly imaginings, of both the mortality-obsessed artist-heroine (the refreshingly plain Justine Clark) and the cancer-haunted photographer-hero (William McInnes), detailing demise via sudden earthquakes, derailed trains, car crashes, etc. Unfortunately, Watt should’ve won the Aussie award for Most Frequent and Obnoxiously Lengthy Song Interludes, without which her film might’ve clocked in at 25 minutes or less. (M.A.)

Moolaadé This visually gorgeous morality tale was written and directed by Ousmane Sembene, considered the father of African cinema. In a small village in Africa, four girls resist ritual “purification” (read: circumcision) by taking refuge at the home of a courageous woman named Collé (Fatoumata Coulibaly). Collé grants the girls moolaadé, a form of protection that can’t be broken by other members of the community. A conflict erupts, pitting women against women, women against men, husbands against wives, and young against old — and getting at the core values and power relationships within a tightly knit society. Though the pace is patient, true to the rhythms of life in the village, this beautifully shot movie seems to fly. (M.L.)

My Mother’s Smile Is there a tortured Italian struggling with fidelity who is not played by Sergio Castellitto? As he did in Don’t Move and Catarina in the Big City, Castellitto here plays a man hounded by his allegiances (or lack thereof) and struggling to maintain some semblance of identity. In this dark and confusing drama, which has the eerie music, blurred shots and stringy tension of a horror movie, Castellitto is pitted against the usual suspects, plus the Catholic Church. He plays Ernesto, an atheist artist who suddenly learns that his dead mother — killed by Ernesto’s unstable brother — is a candidate for canonization. Castellitto’s acting is expert — his face is a map of misery informed by rage — but he can’t save the film from its maudlin, directionless fear-mongering. (M.L.)

Nobody Knows Japanese director Kore-eda Hirokazu’s poignant, deeply affecting tale of child neglect — all the more disturbing for being based on a true story — is definitely not for children, despite its rating. Young single mother Keiko moves her four children into a tiny Tokyo apartment. More child than adult herself, she is loving but also alarmingly casual about her responsibilities as a parent. Twelve-year-old Akira (Yagira Yuya) dutifully shops, cooks, cleans and takes care of his three younger siblings, but his solemn face and anxious eyes reveal the terrible weight he shoulders. One day, Keiko disappears, abandoning the children to go off with her latest boyfriend. The rest of the film charts their struggle to survive. Flawlessly acted (all four children are nonprofessionals) but overly long (nearly two and a half hours), the film is beautiful but depressing. (J.O.)

Only Human A Spanish dinner-theater comedy, this intermittently hilarious contraption by the husband-wife team of Dominic Harari and Teresa De Pelegri heaves Jewish-Palestinian conflict onto a prop-room table already groaning with loaded guns, impromptu sex toys, a wounded duck paddling in a bidet, and a brick of frozen soup that doubles as a sandbag for unlucky pedestrians below. The dominoes start toppling when Leni (Marián Aguilera) brings Palestinian professor Rafi (Guillermo Toledo, from the underrated El Crimen Perfecto) home to meet her fractious Jewish family without warning them of his ethnicity; a misadventure with the soup triggers round after round of escalating humiliations. The movie eventually stretches its complications past the snapping point, especially once the action unwisely moves outside the family’s apartment. But Leni’s mother (Norma Aleandro) has a priceless suspicious deadpan to greet Rafi’s every embarrassment; it’s been a long time since a movie got this much comic mileage out of the devalued reaction shot. (J.R.)

Sequins In this beautiful, beguiling movie, a young woman loses her way and an older woman is suffering a loss. Seventeen-year-old Claire (Lola Naymark) works at a supermarket in her small hometown in rural France, where she is pregnant and deeply unhappy. She can’t decide whether to keep the child, but she wants to hide the pregnancy. Through a friend, she meets Madame Melikian (Ariane Ascaride), an older woman who has lost her son in a motorcycle accident. Claire has a talent for embroidery; Madame Melikian embroiders for Parisian designers, including Lacroix. So begins the women’s strained working relationship, which slowly grows into something more. It’s a slender plot but a very rich movie, with deeply felt silences, gorgeous camerawork and a tender understanding of many kinds of grief. (M.L.)

Take My Eyes Spanish filmmaker Iciar Bollain’s harrowing look at a sick marriage may be the most potent, authentically disturbed film yet about the scourge of domestic violence. But this is no cartoon: Bollain and co-writer Alicia Luna take pains to dramatize the bonds that unite even a deeply troubled couple — fond memories, residual hope, the ecstasies of sex and the comforts of habit. Beautifully acted and intelligently made, this is a film for thinking grownups — a far cry from junk like Sleeping With the Enemy or Enough. (B.G.)

Tideland The most spectacular example of kamikaze auteurism at last fall’s Toronto Film Festival was Terry Gilliam’s almost unwatchable, not altogether unadmirable, and certainly unreleasable Tideland. Having for once made exactly the movie he wanted, Gilliam presents an American-gothic Alice in Wonderland in which little Alice is the logorrheic offspring of two flaming junkies (Jennifer Tilly’s Courtney Love—like slattern and Jeff Bridges’ flatulent Captain Pissgums) and Wonderland is a pair of derelict Midwestern farmhouses seemingly furnished by Wisconsin cannibal Ed Gein. The creatures include a collection of doll heads and Brendan Fletcher’s drooling Forrest Gump parody. Increasingly grotesque in its intimations of pedophilia, the movie ends with a comic train wreck, literally. It will become legend. (J.H.)

The Weeping Meadow Spanning generations of Greek history as experienced by a family of refugees from revolutionary Russia who settle in rural Greece in 1919, Theo Angelopolous’ epic centers on innocent Eleni (Alexandra Aidini), an abandoned child whom the family takes in. Years later, her adoptive brother and father both conceive passions for her, and that’s just the beginning of her troubles. Gliding gracefully from one character to another in a series of endlessly unfolding long takes, Angelopolous’ camera pulls his protagonists through time, sometimes skipping years in a cut, sometimes pausing to minutely detail a band rehearsal or the aftermath of a failed wedding. His perspective is that of a chilly angel, at once distant and tender. (G.R.)

Workingman’s Death Michael Glawogger’s majestic film documents some of the ugliest and most dangerous work on the globe. A stomach-churning critique of the New Globalism is implicit, perhaps better illustrated by the Indonesian sulfur haulers — working on the belly of an active volcano and vividly jaundiced with chemicals — than the Ukrainian closed-coal-mine squatters, whose scrounging subsistence might not have been that different a century ago. Likewise, the appallingly surreal sequence set in an open-air Nigerian slaughterhouse — imagine your favorite Francis Bacon nightmare times a thousand — might have changed little over the millennia. The final major sequence watches laborers in Pakistan gamble with their underpaid lives by cutting up gargantuan decommissioned freighters for scrap on the banks of the Arabian Sea. (M.A.)